Funeral Oration is a melodic punk rock band from Amsterdam that played music between the mid-1980s until the late-1990s. I first heard them on a compilation promo CD for Hopeless Records that I got at the first Warped Tour that I went to, when I was like 11 or 12 years old. I saw Good Riddance and Green Day and NOFX that day when they were all relevant. Snapcase taught me that there was a thing called "hardcore music." I met the Mighty Mighty Bosstones at an autograph tent but the singer's voice was so coarse that I didn't understand what he said to me. It was fucking awesome.
At the time I wasn't really into "punk rock" yet, however;
I didn't fully understand it; I liked the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and I thought that music was supposed to be high-brow and complex and sophisticated and shit; Why is everybody just acting like normal people? Wearing shorts and shit, come on.
For awhile after I got the CD it just kinda sat around the already-ridiculous pile of music that will forever plague my living situations, but seemingly the same week that I realized the genius of The Ramones I also latched onto Funeral Oration's track "Unreal" that's at the very end of "Hopelessly Devoted To You Too";
It's the song just before The Weakerthans track that I now perform sometimes with KP when we do acoustic Gravitys stuff.
Although they were arguably the least-promoted, least-accessible, least-scene band that I had "discovered" at that festival, for some reason they really hit me hard. The dude's voice, it's so fucking peculiar - it's almost like he is yodeling or something but there is absolutely no subtext of humor or irony or anything; homeboy just yodels. That's how he expresses himself.
One day in 8th grade, when me and Mark and our other old-school friends who were all learning about Crass and wearing the same back patches at the same time, we made a trip to Filthy's Records in Lake Elsinore just to go buy punk stuff because there was no punk stuff in Temecula then. I mean, there was, but it was lame post-Blink 182 stuff and we were lame post-post-Misfits kids; totally different.
We picked up other things that day (free copies of Skratch magazine; Propagandhi patches; Bouncing Souls posters; etc) but for me the prize was the Funeral Oration "Discography" double-CD set that I had miraculously found in the mess of go-nowhere 90s-punk CDs scattered in that place.
I just knew, I fucking knew it, you're gonna love this Ian and if you don't get this now you will never ever get it. Nobody likes this band; Nobody knows this band. You will never come across this thing ever again.
The "Discography" title for that double-CD is extremely misleading because it's actually more of a compilation of Funeral Oration's best tracks from their multitude of un-reissused albums instead of a comprehensive collection of ALL the songs (which is what I wanted). But its fucking awesome and the very second that I heard the song "Where Do You Go?" I loved punk rock. I distinctly remember that moment. I was laying in my bed in the afternoon and that song came on and I was like, "holy shit: punk rock."
No one could ever tell you how sacrilegious this next statement is the way I would, but it is (unfortunately?) 100% true for me:
The Ramones didn't get me into punk rock. They didn't make the ultimate statement that I was looking for.
Funeral Oration made me love punk rock.
Funeral Oration means so much more to me than it seems most bands ever mean to anybody. When I talk about this band, I already know that whoever I'm talking to doesn't really know what it is, that I am kinda introducing them to this thing that I love so dearly. Sure, they probably get the reference points of Bad Religion and "skate-punk," etc., but they have never heard the glory that is Funeral Oration and they will never understand until they hear it. Maybe they won't hear what I hear, but I hear it.
Many years have passed (a fucking decade or so if we wanna get real) since I first got that compilation and in that time I purchased several F.O. LPs from shady German distros and kinda quietly got the people who are actually important in my life to maybe give the band a try. It's not the kind of thing I want to push in people's faces, but I do think people should know.
Because I love them.
The second CD of the set is actually a studio recording of Funeral Oration performing some of their 90s tracks live. I always kinda disregarded it because alot of whats on there is represented on the first disc in their original versions. But I lost that first CD somewhere along the way and for the last couple nights I've been listening to that live set in between news pieces on TV and obsessive repetition of "Junebug" by The B-52's.
I had that CD in my pocket this morning because I wanted to listen to it on the way to work. I'm such a haphazard bastard that I put CDs into my jean pockets and expect them not to be damaged, but physics and form are real things so when I lunged into the car the CD snapped.
I immediately felt it and I pulled the fragments out of my pocket in utter disbelief.
Did I just break a Funeral Oration CD? MY Funeral Oration CD? THE ONLY FUNERAL ORATION CD THAT EXISTS???
In my mind, this is something that cannot be replaced. Despite the background status this music holds for me, it's still the background of my life, the thing I fall back on without telling anyone.
How could I have done this?
No one else can ever understand except for me.
"Where Do You Go?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG4-TMR9q-M
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